Stripe Fund Invests $500,000 in Baremetrics

It’s a really exciting day here at Baremetrics! I’m stoked to announce that General Catalyst has invested $500,000 in Baremetrics, as part of a new fund they’ve created for businesses on Stripe.

What started as a scratch-my-own-itch project 11 months ago, quickly turned into a full-fledged business with $20,000/mo in revenue, and growing. Let’s take a look at what this means, how we got here and where we’re going!

The juicy bits

It’s a $500,000 investment from General Catalyst at a $10,000,000 valuation cap. We used a SAFE for the agreement itself.

The investment amount lets us focus specifically on the Stripe platform and build out the best product possible for Stripe customers without needing to expand to other payment processors anytime soon. In reality I don’t believe we’ll ever need to expand to other processors given how fast Stripe is growing.

Why take any investment?

Up to this point we’ve been bootstrapped with $20,000/mo in revenue and are profitable. We’ve turned down all other investment (as well as acquisition) offers, but when this opportunity came up, it just made sense from every aspect we could think of.

There are two huge wins for us and, more importantly, our customers.

Product growth speed. The investment lets us hire exponentially sooner, enabling us to build out the product faster and provide better tools for our customers much sooner. It also allows us to hire a dedicated support team. All of this adds up for a more useful product with a better experience for our customers.

Under the hood with Stripe. As part of this investment, Stripe has committed to doing what it can to support the long-term success of companies built on the Stripe platform. They’ll be around to help when we need it and we’ll ensure that the combination of Stripe and the ecosystem creates great products for businesses.

Given we’ve built a business around Stripe’s platform, they’re about the only company we’d actually even be interested in partnering with at this level anyway.

How this came to be…

Let’s gather ‘round for a little story time with Josh. Here’s what led to making this deal happen and how it all played out.

Since the beginning, Stripe has been extremely supportive. Within a few weeks of launching, they reached out and enthusiastically agreed that Baremetrics should exist for Stripe users. They flew me out to San Francisco to talk about building on the platform and how they could make Stripe Connect better for businesses like ours.

After that trip in December, Baremetrics reallykickedupitsgrowth and it became clear that we could build a significant business. There’s an obvious need and a sizable market to support that need.

At that point, growth became a waiting game. We were confident in the business model, but didn’t have the funds yet to sustain hiring more folks and really grow the product (which in turn should grow revenue).

This is the point where outside funding can make a lot of sense. Bootstrapping it to this point bought us time to prove the business, and now an influx of cash would let us expand on that at a much faster rate.

So, at the end of July, Patrick (CEO of Stripe) and I were chatting about some things Baremetrics had in the works. That led to a few more conversations about how they could help along with another trip out to San Francisco, and an intro to General Catalyst and an endorsement for their new Stripe Initiative.

In what I can only assume was some insane record amount of time, 23 days after the idea of GC investing was proposed, we closed the deal (including the process of splitting Baremetrics out into its own entity…but sweet goodness that’s a story for another blog post).

And so here we are!

Selfishly, I can’t think of a bigger vote of confidence in the product we’re building than to get a $500,000 investment and endorsement from General Catalyst and Stripe. Ah, warm fuzzies! 🙂

You can read more about GC’s Stripe Ecosystem Initiative and the application process here.

So what’s next?!?!

We’re primarily using the money to hire folks, so that’s what’s immediately next.

We’ve got a lot of big tools and improvements already in the works, and that trend will continue.

There’s a lot more I’d like to write about this, but I’ve rambled enough already. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks and get back into a regular routine of posting on the blog (the past few weeks have been pretty distracting, as you can imagine).

A huge thanks to Patrick at Stripe for being so supportive of the ecosystem and thanks to Hemant at General Catalyst for making this become a reality.

If you have any questions about this, post ‘em in the comments below or email me! As usual, always happy to talk ‘shop!

Josh Pigford

Josh Pigford is the Founder of Baremetrics and a serial maker of things. You can find him at @Shpigford & josh@baremetrics.com, where he will almost certainly probably most likely definitely reply to you.